


Journey to the End; or, A Statement

by saretton



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Background Ze'mer/Traitor's Daughter, Crossover, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), as a concept and as an entity, come get your sweet sadness and melancholia cocktail, get ready for the Hallownest Grand Tour 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25242448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saretton/pseuds/saretton
Summary: Statement of an unnamed ladybug regarding a journey in search of a second encounter with the End. Undated.Statement begins.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	Journey to the End; or, A Statement

**Author's Note:**

> This little thing couldn't have been possible without [annbun](https://annbun.tumblr.com/). She was the one to come up with the whole idea of a crossover between Hollow Knight and TMA; I ran away with it and wrote this fic almost in a trance state. Thank you for this brilliant idea!
> 
> Please notice that, at the moment of posting, I have only listened up to MAG 140 included.
> 
> Huge thanks to my beta, [TheKnittingJedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKnittingJedi/pseuds/TheKnittingJedi), who accepted to have the whole game plot spoiled by proofreading this little fic. Also, thank you for having slowly converted me to TMA some months ago. "I don't know whether I should listen to it," I said... before doing it and starting to write fanfiction about it.

_Statement of an unnamed ladybug regarding a journey in search of a second encounter with the End. Undated._

_Statement begins._

I suppose I should start from the beginning to reach the end, shouldn’t I?

If so, be it.

Life isn’t easy for us ladybugs. There are few members of our tribe left, but we will be here when everyone else passes away. When the Lord of Shades finally claims the lands I roam, my family and I will still be alive with him.

I’ve been roaming, and I’ve always roamed, ever since I was a tiny ladybug.

When I still hadn’t learned to fly and to flit around, the last of my kind made a deal with the End. Their obsessive thought, their fear of dying and of extinction summoned what would become “our god”, though I am still unsure to consider it as such. I wish I had better words to describe my relationship with it…

Anyway, the point is, my family were so desperate that they dared negotiate immortality with it as soon as they met it; and the End, despite all the legends and the stories cloaking its bones, did _not_ play games with them.

“Puny ones,” the grinning, hooded exoskeleton said without opening its mouth, “I can’t turn you into anything similar to me. But you’re straightforward. I like you.” Its clacking, echoing voice fell deadly silent for a bit. “I will grant you everlasting luck. Whatever happens, you will be lucky, and you will not die.” Then, with its typical, bleak and sharp humour, it added, “Good luck with that.”

Poor fools. They didn’t know they were condemning our whole kind, me included, to a life of misery.

I grew up; but after a while, I stopped growing altogether. I saw my first friends and playmates crumbling to pieces and coming back to the earth; I lived on.

Disgusted of what my family had subjected me to, I left them. I’ve never come back and I don’t know what happened to them. They’re still alive, no doubt. It was a long time ago… I wonder if they remember me at all.

They have probably forgotten me. I admit I don’t care much, but I can’t say I like the idea, either. Many gods, too, do not like being forgotten; and when it happens, they _make_ you remember them. But it took me time to learn it.

\----------

Like I said, I started my journey early in my life. It must be… centuries ago, by now, I think. I’ve been looking for a way to revert the curse and find rest, let the End claim me, lay mindless and motionless and become nutrition to the earth.

But the End keeps eluding me. It seems, as I think it should be, that the more I look for it, the more it flees in a rattle of bones. It doesn’t want a second meeting. Still, one day, perhaps…

In my travels, I learned of different gods than those I already knew; I met creatures and visited lands touched by their power. None of them were more infested with divine presence than a specific plague-infected kingdom below the ground.

“Hallownest”, the kind people of the village of Dirtmouth told me it was called. A name that, indeed, demanded respect. It took me a great amount of time to know its deepest secrets.

After the turmoil due to the arrival of the Pale King, the inhabitants became restless, and each of them turned into a potential vessel ready to contain fear. Naturally, many ended up being touched by a god or another, like I am.

It was as if the gods had made a pact among themselves, wanting to conquer the whole kingdom, one slice each. The whole kingdom became a minefield of terrors and the dead piled high in the tunnels like wheat in a granary; eventually, the gods themselves had to leave to find other creatures to be worshipped by and to feed on. Hallownest was forsaken; few gods stayed. Mine, of course, was among them. I know all of this because I’ve lived long enough in that kingdom to _see_ these changes.

The first time I came to Dirtmouth, I jumped into a hole in the ground that looked like a well, and there I was, in Hallownest. Too easy – like knocking on a door and finding it already open. Still, I immediately felt something was wrong. The Pale King hadn’t left yet, and the White Lady hadn’t tied herself up inside her garden; the Infection was just starting to spread.

It was… striking, to say the least. I mean, you couldn’t possibly _not_ see the Infection in those touched by it. Not there, below the ground, in those caves and tunnels. It’s just… it’s just that they _shine_. There’s a burning light oozing out of the sick ones like pus, engulfing them slowly until they are destroyed. It disgusted me at first; but, unpleasant as it is to admit it, I got used to seeing it.

Mind you, I still pitied the sick, but I wasn’t scared of finding myself infected. I knew the Radiance, or the Desolation as they call her elsewhere, would never hurt me or touch me. I’d be lucky and I wouldn’t die. Still, seeing the sick ones in their agony… I didn’t feel so lucky then. I don’t wish it on anybody.

\-----------

The Eye is undoubtedly a peculiar god to serve. It is unmoving, and yet it knows all, it sees all.

I remember my conversations with Monomon, the Teacher. She served the Archives; she was at their head, actually, and that made her full of knowledge. Or perhaps it was the other way around – that she was the head archivist _because_ she knew everything? Who can tell?

The building itself was a round, fascinating complex – green stained glasses and transparent cases and vials full of a fizzling, bubbling fluid that looked a little too much like acid. A pink, benign, dream-like fog surrounded the whole area around the complex; the paths were covered by a luxuriant jungle of dainty vines and populated by jellyfish big and small. They were eyeless, yet somehow they still knew how and when to let me through or to guide me to another direction; they knew when I was lost or was about to change my mind. They _knew_ , and that was that.

Monomon had a young apprentice at the time of my visit, when the infection was only starting to spread. They both welcomed me inside the Archives, offered me tea and rest. She explained that Quirrel (that was the apprentice’s name) was still learning, but he was destined to fulfil a great task for her. She looked motherly as she said this; if her voice was sad, Quirrel didn’t notice, busy as he was being proud of this mysterious deed he would do.

To be fair, at first I was intimidated by the Teacher’s grace, by her slow and thoughtful movements. She literally floated mid-air, like she was a goddess herself. Her tentacles were long and transparent like her elaborate words, but ultimately soft-looking and innocuous; at times, her gown-shaped body seemed so wide that it could store all the knowledge of Hallownest and beyond. She kept much of her sources of information behind those glass vials and cases, written in weird runes and forgotten languages. I’m a little proud to say that I could decipher a good number of them – because of my long life, you see…

Monomon explained that her job was that of preserving and storing all the knowledge of that world for the generations to come (and I can say now that they weren’t many). She kept frequent correspondence with Lurien, the Watcher, who often helped her _get_ that knowledge. Lurien lived in his tower high above the City of Tears. With his telescope, he literally watched over houses, streets and townspeople to protect them (or so he said). Rumour had it that he never stopped watching: he lived by that telescope, and a faithful butler helped him with other menial worries like, for instance, living.

In one of our further conversations, Monomon, the Teacher and Archivist, told me that she and Lurien were seeing the coming of a great danger, and that they were conceiving a plan to protect the kingdom. I was aware, by then, that there were wars between the gods. Creatures like Monomon and Lurien were nothing but pawns in their invisible, enormous hands.

When the time came to stop the Infection, they chose their end, together with Herrah. (Well, she had other reasons to join them, and I’m going to talk about her later.) They fell into a gentle, demanding, everlasting slumber, so that their minds would be focused only on keeping the door to the Temple of the Black Egg sealed.

Poor Pure Vessel, poor Hollow Knight. I have thought a lot about the doom-stained prophecy about him. “You shall seal the blinding light that plagues their dreams…”

What a way to try to fight a goddess, and the Radiance no less. The blaze always knows how to seep through the tiniest crack in your shell. You can sleep as long as you want, but sooner or later the light will come to wake you up.

\----------

During the long time I spent in Hallownest, I went everywhere I could. I even looked down into the Howling Cliffs and I ascended the Crystal Peak. I found only eerie vastness there. Perfect places to die stupidly, without a purpose; lovely venues to rest forever, where no one will look for you, should you go missing.

I found a statue of the Radiance perched atop the Crystal Peak, just outside of Hallownest’s Crown. Askew and forgotten, half-sunken and half-crumbled, but still majestic. I don’t know how she can always look so elegant, even in destruction. Selfish, devastating, but undeniably beautiful.

The story is pretty simple. Some of the people of Hallownest feared this strange goddess of light and fire, and preferred to forget her. She didn’t like that. She tried to come back, injected her own light and fire into her forgetful believers’ minds in the form of poisonous dreams, until these began to plague their bodies. That’s the Desolation: she burns and lives off you and drives you mad with thirst and consumes you like a candle.

Yet, I didn’t feel alone like I thought I would in those vast places; not as much as I felt at the Kingdom’s Edge. I swear that in that borderless land you can _feel_ the fog sticking to your skin, trying to soothe you with grey words of nothingness until your senses go numb.

As I explored the place, I was surprised to uncover the entrance to an even more forgotten kingdom than what Hallownest would become. It was, as it happened, a beehive.

I had heard stories that were starting to become legends about its cheerful, hard-working and sweet tribe: they had chosen to live cloistered away to prevent the Desolation from reaching them. It worked, but their voluntary reclusion and detachment led to loneliness, which took its toll anyway on their sanity.

From friendly and always willing to help, the hive had become a suspicious nation. Once I’d entered the beehive through a secret tunnel, Queen Vespa agreed to receive me after a rather long time. She was gigantic, bigger than any mortal creature I’d ever met before. We talked of doom and the nature of the world and things that (in her words) “I couldn’t understand”. We didn’t talk for long, though; all of a sudden she announced that, large as she was, she felt the End approaching, and would soon be entombed forever in amber, welcoming my god in loneliness by her will. “To rail against nature,” she declared, “is folly. All things must accept an end. I’m choosing to accept it alone.” In that moment, I felt her close to what I was vaguely looking for, close perhaps to my god, too; but she refused to say anything more and shut herself off, denying me and her own subjects any further contact.

The bees are mystifying and full of secrets; strange creatures who dance to talk. How sad, then, to see them stubbornly defend their crumbling home and their dead queen encrusted in a lonely tomb of amber and wax and honey; they kept fighting even after the Desolation reached them, weakened as they were without Vespa’s protection. It gave me something to meditate about.

Perhaps, were I dead, someone would fight for me too; yet, I live on.

\----------

My journey brought me in the most anguishing and haunting corner of the world you could ever find below the surface: the Deepnest, a land claimed by as many as three gods in constant war with one another.

The Buried, who loves choking you; the Dark, who loves you blind; and finally, the Web, who loves putting strings and threads on you. You may not have a good life, if you live in the Deepnest, but it’s certain that you won’t have a good death.

(In a remote corner of those hellish tunnels, there even lived a creature who masked itself as other, friendlier bugs to lure you into its nest and devour you. Quite frankly, if this means that the Stranger is trying to feed on that place’s many fears as well, I do _not_ want to know. It’s already scary as it is.)

Now, about the Web – I eventually reached the farthest end of the Deepnest, which is simply called “Distant Village”. It’s the realm of the Weavers, from where the Web keeps trying to claim the rest of that miserable, suffocating and dark place. I’d heard rumours about how the Weavers feed on lies and manipulations, and a nasty encounter with one of them, the Midwife, only proved them true; but otherwise they were a harmless tribe. They also had a strange affiliation with the Eye, weaving stories for it to read. A friendship between gods, you could say, or an agreement at least.

At the time of my visit, Queen Herrah hadn’t chosen to be a Dreamer yet, and the Weavers still hadn’t left their home as a consequence.

Herrah was a true Beast, like her nickname suggested: absolutely ferocious in her determination to get what she wanted. I’ve never met anyone who was willing to sacrifice themself more for their spawn. She _had_ that will, though, and eventually she put herself to sleep forever with Monomon and Lurien just to protect her people from the Infection.

Families are so different. There are some who would rather die than let something bad happen to future generations. Then there are others, like mine, who simply don’t want to die, even if it means condemning some of their members to a never-ending journey to find peace…

I’m told that Hornet, Herrah’s daughter, is alive and well, and strives to protect whatever remains of Hallownest. I’d like to meet her one day. I’m sure we’d have much to talk about.

\----------

Even further below, following the trail of silence from the Ancient Basin, I found the Abyss. A strange place… It seemed like it had been waiting for me.

I never understood fully the god called Flesh. I don’t think I did when I reached the bottom of that place, either, but what I saw was certainly not easy to forget.

Thousands, millions of empty shells, piled one on the other, covered the ground. Walking on those motionless bones, flitting over those useless faces, made my antennae quiver in shock. Even when I discovered that the Pale King was responsible for such atrocities, my mind still couldn’t come to terms with his reasons. It still doesn’t.

What right did he have to conduct those experiments, to discard body after body in its search for an unreachable pureness? What was the point, if the Desolation eventually claimed Hallownest anyway?

Even though I still ask myself those questions, walking on those discarded faces taught me that the ways in which my god eventually reaches you are always unexpected. That is, _if_ it ever decides to reach you.

\----------

In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the people of the City of Tears end up buried inside of it. Give it three or four centuries more and the Blue Lake above the city will collapse. I can already picture the gentle and romantic rain that usually falls from the ceiling cascading onto the buildings and the streets, a liquid, heavy mass choking everything under its weight.

Until then, its inhabitants live serene and mostly unaware. The Buried has always liked pouncing on its victims and leaving them breathless.

I met an odd-looking… _thing_ who lived in a tower of one of the many palaces of the City. Finding the key to open its door was tricky, but in the end the Tower of Love opened for me.

_It_ , for lack of better words, was a shape with too many hands, long limbs, and greedy fingers. It looked like it was made of distorted matter, or perhaps it was just its cloak. I don’t think I’ll ever know. It seemed friendly but dangerous – just like its laugh: joyful and scary. Sometimes I can still hear it.

I don’t know what became of it – making conversation was difficult, nearly impossible. I only managed to deduce that, to become so, it must have been claimed by the Spiral. I left it to its destiny and its twisted obsession, to its dreams of safety for the little creatures of its collection who needed no protection at all, and were ultimately trapped in glass jars with no way out. For the first time in several decades, I felt pity for other creatures than myself.

Then, climbing even higher than the Tower of Love, I found a strange building made out of the exoskeleton of a Wyrm. The dead god’s remains were used as a fighting arena, called “the Colosseum of Fools”. This was, indeed, a peculiar notion in itself.

What really left me speechless, though, was the complete joy and eagerness with which creatures great and small would throw themselves into that pit to slaughter one another in front of the corpse of an equally slaughtered king. I sat among the audience, watching the shows with detached scientific interest, and I admit it was… impressing, at least initially. None of those fools seemed to care whether they’d live or die in that arena.

I found it a rather stupid way to look for the end. Glory? What for? To praise a bloody god like the Slaughter? Simply appalling. I didn’t stay long. As I went out, I was met by a new wave of foolish contestants who entered the Colosseum. I would have wished them good luck, but there was no need… I would never see any of them again.

\----------

The Resting Grounds of the City lie in a separate area above it. Isn’t it strange, the way some of our lives seem to be so important that they deserve bigger tombs and mausoleums to be remembered? The truth is simpler. No matter anyone’s importance: my god comes for all, except for me.

I found spirits of every kind in that graveyard. Chatted with them. Learned their stories. It felt strange, to disturb their rest with my restless questions. Yet, I thought – who better than someone who is already dead to talk about my curse and guide me to the End?

To my disappointment, they didn’t understand. My god had already come for them, but they seemed to think they were, inexplicably, still alive. I tried hard to talk to them, then I gave up.

I came back years later to those same Resting Grounds and found a new, great statue paying homage to the sacrifice of the three Dreamers. They, too, had had to give in to what was, one way or another, my god. They had chosen to be trapped in a wilful sleep that ultimately turned out to be neither life nor dream. Only death.

The Web and the Eye can be powerful, but even they have to succumb eventually; and it felt strange, to be personally acquainted with such a powerful god. It still does.

\----------

I met a tall, melancholy lady, living by herself near the graveyard. She was all draped in her graceful grey gown, her enormous needle resting against the walls of her living room.

She was, indeed, mysterious. She said her name was Ze’mer, though I discovered that to many bugs of shorter memory she was simply known as “the Grey Mourner”; she talked in an alien language that was a little tricky to grasp, as if the wind had suddenly carried her there.

We talked for a long time. Well, _she_ talked, mostly. The more she did, the more I understood her language, her sorrow and her story. She, too, seemed to have made an unspoken deal with my god. She should have died many, many years before, and yet she still seemed to be young and strong, though undeniably wilted in her mourning.

She talked about her lover who had died time before, young and still perfect. Ze’mer remembered their endless strolls inside the greenhouses of the Queen’s Gardens; she remembered plucking delicate flowers just for her, the young princess of the Mantis tribe and the loveliest thing she’d set eyes on. She remembered extending her limbs to give her those flowers as a shy offering. Ze’mer was still learning the language of Hallownest, and those silver flowers carried all the words she still didn’t know and couldn’t say. Her beloved had always accepted them with joy and surprise, as if it had been always something completely new and not a ritual of some sorts between them.

But their love, Ze’mer told me, was doomed. Her lover’s people, the stern and serious Mantis tribe, so fond of order and tradition, had ended the poor princess without regret. Their family was kept intact, but at a great cost. Her father, one of the Mantis Lords, was engulfed completely by the Infection. He became a mindless beast, focussed only on the fire inside of him and on destruction.

Ze’mer’s waiting for the End, I realised, had a sense of finality. A purpose. Mine had not.

One day she would find a chosen one who’d help her pay her last homage to her lover, someone who could go lay one last delicate flower on her lover’s grave. She knew that would mark her end, and seemed to be looking for nothing else.

I was sad when I heard she was gone. I grieved, of course. (When am I not grieving the mortals friends I make in my journey? When don’t I mourn? Perhaps, though, I grieved more for her than for all the others who left my meaningless, eternal life.)

Mourning the Mourner… Doesn’t it sound funny? I bid her farewell by visiting her house once more. She’d left everything behind, even her formidable needle from her knighthood days; it was still resting against the wall, ready to be held and to strike.

That day I learned that no matter if we’re immortal – we ladybugs can still cry.

\----------

I now roam other lands and other kingdoms. Whatever else should I do?

I wonder what will become of me when I have visited all the kingdoms in their ruin and glory, when my god still eluding me with the same clack of bones.

I could always come back and revisit them all, again and again, but what for? To add other friends to the list of the ones I’m grieving for? It’s an option that I don’t know how long I can keep choosing.

Time will tell; for now, I journey on.

**Author's Note:**

> Only after finishing this fic did I realise I could have added Troupe Master Grimm & co. as avatars of the Stranger. They would have been perfect, but in retrospect I also felt they wouldn't have worked with what I wanted to tell. Maybe next time!
> 
> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://saretton.tumblr.com/). :)


End file.
